Tom Clement spent more than a year poking around the University of Washington, looking for the next hot medical device idea to develop after his long run at Kirkland, WA-based Pathway Medical Technologies. And now he’s latched onto a new technology he says could become a low-cost, disposable, and accurate way to diagnose a leading cause of stroke.

The technology is now taking shape at Bellevue, WA-based Cardiac Insight, which is putting the finishing touches this week on a $700,000 financing in Series A preferred stock, Clement says. The company has its license from the UW lab of cardiologist David Linker, and has attracted some well-known directors to its board, including former SonoSite chairman Kirby Cramer and former Physio-Control president Richard Martin. Clement is the CEO, and is now splitting time between Cardiac Insight and another UW spinoff, Aqueduct Neurosciences.

The idea at Cardiac Insight is to develop a new tool for diagnosing atrial fibrillation, or “afib,” which is an irregular heartbeat that affects 2.2 million people in the U.S. each year. This is a hard-to-diagnose condition, since many people with it just feel fatigue. Yet it ends up causing an estimated 90,000 strokes a year in the U.S. among people who weren’t aware of their higher risk from afib, Clement says. There are various devices known as Holter monitors on the market today from big companies like GE, Philips Healthcare, and from startups like San Francisco-based iRhythm. Cardiac Insight is seeking its advantage with a low-cost, convenient device, that’s accurate enough to avoid setting off lots of false alarms.

“Basically this is a super-elegant, 7-day continuous Holter monitor that’s the size of a Band-Aid,” Clement says.

There are a number of problems with the existing technologies for monitoring afib today, Clement says. They depend on electrodes that attach to the chest to pick up the heart rhythm, and sometimes the electrodes are attached to a device that clips onto a belt, making it a bit bulky. Some of the devices record and store heart rhythm data for several days to a week, but then the data needs to be sent to a reading center where expert technicians try to suss out whether the device is picking up a genuine case of afib, or a false alarm, Clement says. Some don’t have much data storage capacity, and are essentially “event monitors” that allow people to push a button when they think something is going on, but which don’t capture the heart rhythm context around that event.

Tom Clement, CEO of Cardiac Insight

Linker, a cardiologist and bioengineer, has sought to come up with a simple way to diagnose afib with a combination of hardware and software. The device gets stuck onto the patient’s chest with an adhesive, like a bandage that’s four inches long and one inch wide, Clement says. Inside that light bandage there is an electrode to pick up the heart rhythm, a flexible circuit board with memory to store data, and software with an algorithm that processes the data. The patient will wear the device for seven days to collect continuous data on the heart rhythm, or maybe a couple of seven-day periods that aren’t back-to-back, to get enough of a sample size to reach a conclusion. When the patient comes back to the doctor, they rip off the device, plug its USB cord into a computer, and upload the data.

Part of Cardiac Insight’s special sauce is in its software algorithm, which is supposed to … Next Page »

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The folks at Redmond, WA-based Mobisante have what entrepreneurs sometimes call a “high-class problem.” The startup is getting more attention for its ultrasound-on-a-smartphone product than it really wants in its infancy.

Mobisante, a startup founded in 2007, started turning heads back in February, after Xconomy reported that it was the first company to win FDA clearance to sell a diagnostic ultrasound tool on smartphone hardware. The vision was to put the power of ultrasound—with its ability to look inside the body at damaged internal organs or developing fetuses—on a machine that costs as little as $7,500. That’s exciting to people in developing countries, and budget-strapped clinics in the U.S., who can’t afford the ultrasound machines on the market today that typically run between $20,000 to $100,000 and up.

Suddenly, ER doctors who have limited access to ultrasound got buzzing. The company caught the attention of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and the folks at MobiHealthNews, who wrote stories in the past few weeks about the promise of the technology, and its commercial rollout.

The excitement about the device was encouraging, says co-founder and CEO Sailesh Chutani, but he doesn’t want people to get carried away. His company has four employees, and a network of consultants. It took months longer than expected to get manufacturing protocols set up to FDA standards, so that the devices could be properly tracked in case of a future product recall. Mobisante hasn’t built up inventory of its product yet, and hasn’t started actively marketing, and yet it is sitting on a list of 300 sales leads from potential customers. Eight months after FDA clearance, it has gotten to the point where it can take advance payment from customers, and deliver a device in three weeks, Chutani says.

Just last week, it reached a milestone. It got paid for its first commercial device, from a customer in the Philippines.

Sailesh Chutani

“We didn’t want to make a fuss about the product, we want to have a ‘soft’ launch,” Chutani says. “Our goal has been to sell limited numbers to our clinical partners. Somehow the news got viral.”

Before Mobisante can seriously start converting more customer leads into sales orders, and orders into deliveries, it has a lot of work to do. It is talking to a couple of VCs about raising some more money, striking some important clinical partnerships, and working behind the scenes to hit its stride in manufacturing. And, importantly, it has some key clinical trial work still to do.

Excited as some of the initial customers are, Mobisante has gotten feedback from customers over the past several months about a new iteration that could be even more interesting. The company is working on a tablet-based ultrasound system that it says some customers will prefer over the original smartphone product.

There are a few reasons why customers might prefer a tablet. The original MobiUS that’s now FDA-approved runs on a Toshiba TG01 smartphone handset, which has a Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. That’s an old version of the software, but Mobisante had to go with it. That’s because … Next Page »

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The revolution of cloud computing is poised to have a major impact on the healthcare technology market. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the developments surrounding medical imaging. While concerns over availability and privacy have slowed adoption to date, those are issues are highly addressable and the market is moving forward.

Medical imaging is a $170 billion a year market that includes tools like MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) and CT scans (X-ray computed tomography). It is full of inefficiencies and redundant imaging which lead to unnecessary radiation exposure.

The American College of Radiology created a standard for medical imaging in 1993 called DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine). This is a standard for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information across medical imaging. DICOM enables the integration of scanners, servers, workstations, printers and network hardware from multiple manufacturers into a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System). While General Electric, McKesson and Philips are the primary suppliers of imaging equipment, the PACS market is highly fragmented. A system comprised of imaging equipment and a corresponding PACS system has traditionally been very hardware intensive and expensive, and access to image studies has been relatively limited. This industry is about to be significantly disrupted.

Over the past several weeks I had the chance to meet with executives from 3 companies looking to transform medical imaging by moving it to the cloud. Each company intends to eliminate the need for patients transporting CDs around with their image studies. Each company also states their intent to expand image availability beyond the 30,000 radiologists in the industry to reach specialists, surgeons, primary care physicians and even patients. Despite the similar stated goals, each company is approaching the solution differently.

SeeMyRadiology: Arman Sharafshahi, one of the two founders of the Atlanta, GA-based company, describes their approach as straight out of the Salesforce.com playbook. Their platform provides three methods for getting images into the cloud including an option for high volume uploads from hospitals or image centers. They set out to build this cloud-based system after years in the imaging space under their corporate name Accelerad. The system includes a basic cloud viewer with a social networking element under the hood. There is no cost to have a basic account and to upload images. All that’s needed is a browser. Generally, larger hospitals and imaging centers are the paying clients while most physician offices access the system at no cost, the thought being that specialists and surgeons are actually benefiting financially from a new patient and the corresponding study. The SeeMyRadiology system will be embedded in some HIE products, and announcements about those partnerships are forthcoming this Spring. The company did announce the introduction of an API at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference and Mr. Sharafshahi made a point that they will make a strong push to get images into the hands of patients. The company has venture capital backing and may seek another round of funding at some point this year.

LifeImage: Jackie Walsh of LifeImage shared that things are moving at a very fast clip for LifeImage, a company formed by alums from Amicas, a PACS company based in Boston. LifeImage recently closed a $12M Series B Venture Capital round with Cardinal Partners and Galen Partners, and boasts EMC as a strategic partner. Like SeeMyRadiology, LifeImage includes an appliance option for accounts with higher volume requirements. The company is working with clients to determine the optimal revenue model. At present, each of lifeIMAGE’s services (lifeIMAGE Enterprise, lifeIMAGE DropBox and lifeIMAGE OutBox) are priced as monthly subscriptions, rather than fee per upload or share. LifeImage has integrated its system with Microsoft HealthVault which allows a patient’s images to be easily transferred to their PHR (personal health record).

eMix: Florent Saint-Clair, the eMix General Manager, explained they are taking a different approach than the other two companies in several ways. First, eMix is being incubated inside DR Systems, a long-term leader in the PACS market. It’s worth noting that a client does not need to be customer of DR Systems in order to use eMix. Additionally, the company formed an alliance with virtualization and cloud computing company VMWare and uses its technology at the center of its solution. Interestingly, eMix also uses EMC storage systems in the background. The company is making head-way with 150 customers and counting and how now launched in Germany. Once an organization becomes an eMix customer (which requires no hardware or software), their users may send images to others outside the system. Recipients get a notification prompting them to respond for security verification. Once an initial “handshake” has been completed, a recipient does not need to repeat the process for future image studies.

As of the time of this writing, I am aware of at least two more cloud solutions on their way to the imaging market, but not ready to go on record. One is from an innovative group of technologists and the other from an industry powerhouse.

The increased activity in the space is indicative of the disruptive influence cloud computing will have. Despite a handful of players in the cloud medical imaging space, and more to come, it’s a fragmented market and there is a lot of opportunity to go around.

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Mobisante has a vision of taking the next step in miniaturization of ultrasound technology, and today it has raised some of the cash it needs to carry out the idea.

The Redmond, WA-based company has raised an undisclosed amount of seed financing from Seattle-based WRF Capital. Mobisante plans to use the cash to finish some key development steps with technology that puts diagnostic ultrasound capability on a smartphone. If all goes well, the company could win clearance from the FDA to start selling the product in the first or second quarter of 2011, says CEO Sailesh Chutani.

Mobisante was founded by Chutani, a former senior director in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile group, and David Zar, an ultrasound researcher who previously worked at Washington University in St. Louis. Their plan, which engineer Nikhil George described in demo last week at an MIT Enterprise Forum event, is to hook an ultrasound probe into a smartphone so that its diagnostic capability can fit in a doctor’s pocket. Traditional ultrasound machines, made by companies like General Electric, Philips, and Siemens, can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and sit on big carts that are operated primarily by radiologists. Mobisante is hoping that by going with a low-cost, super-lightweight alternative, it will enable ordinary physicians from a wider array of disciplines to look inside the body quickly and easily for things like internal bleeding.

“Mobisante is a wonderful example of new innovative companies that are leveraging the deep local talent in Seattle to solve important global health problems,” said Loretta Little, managing director of WRF Capital, in a company statement.

If Mobisante can deliver this kind of small ultrasound tool to the marketplace, it could have significant implications for global health. About 70 percent of the population around the world currently lacks access to ultrasound imaging, Mobisante says, because of the cost and complex nature of many ultrasound systems. Since cell phones are so widely used around the world, the ultrasound images can be sent from remote areas to consulting physicians in a hospital, by building on a lot of pre-existing wireless communications infrastructure, the company says.

Mobisante isn’t the only company thinking about tackling this problem—Bothell, WA-based SonoSite (NASDAQ: SONO) has worked with doctors in Uganda to see what kind of impact its hand-held ultrasound machines can make. Like SonoSite has learned in its years of ultrasound miniaturization, the technology that will have to prove its medical value to physicians, and its economic value to the folks who purchase equipment. As I noted last week, the images George showed to the audience at the MIT Enterprise Forum are not the kind of vivid pictures that heavy-duty and expensive machines on the market deliver now. The key question is whether they are good enough to help doctors perform some fundamental tasks that they can’t already do in cost-effective way today.

It may not be long before Mobisante gets its chance to really prove to doctors what its tool can do. George, in his talk last week, says the company is ready for the challenge.

“This is not a toy,” George said. “It’s a real ultrasound machine.”

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Relume Technologies might become one of the great growth stories in the state of Michigan’s tech sector next year. The Oxford, MI-based maker of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting products and networked lighting control systems is aiming for significant increases in revenue and employment over the next year, president and chief technology officer Peter Hochstein says.

The company raised its first institutional capital last year from Beringea, the Farmington Hills, MI-based venture firm, Hochstein says. Ever since, the company has been investing in modernizing its manufacturing operations in Oxford and improving its sales and distribution. The investment appears to be paying off.

Relume, which is expecting sales of around $8 million this year, has gained orders for next year that could help the firm double its revenue in 2011, Hochstein says. Also, the firm might double its work force of about 50 people over the next year because of the expected increase in business. In the first quarter of 2011, he says, the company expects to raise more money from Beringea as one of multiple investments that are expected to total about $7 million.

The LED market consists of major players like General Electric, Osram Sylvania, and Philips Lighting, but when it comes to the design and assembly of LED lighting products, “no one does anything close to what we do,” Hochstein says.

Relume has differentiated methods for fabricating its lighting assemblies to make them last longer and perform better than others, Hochstein says. While the firm doesn’t produce LED semiconductors, it makes … Next Page »

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The “two guys in a garage” story of how technology companies get started is a powerful one in Silicon Valley. And it does happen: there really was a garage at Hewlett-Packard in the 1930s, Apple in the 1970s, and Google in the 1990s. The Mountain View, CA-based Y Combinator startup incubator, where most companies consist of two or three co-founders, is essentially one big garage. But startups can also come from other places—including large technology companies, where there’s often a surfeit of creative researchers and product developers, but a shortage of vision among company leadership about how to bring their promising ideas to market. (Or, to put it more charitably, a disconnect between the researchers’ ideas and the companies’ existing markets.)

That’s where New Venture Partners comes in. At this one-of-a-kind firm, which has offices in San Mateo, CA, Murray Hill, NJ, Ipswich, England, and Bussum, The Netherlands, the specialty of the house is finding promising technologies that aren’t going anywhere inside their native corporate R&D labs and spinning them out into successful companies. With more than $700 million under management, including a $300 million fund that closed in 2006, NVP has unearthed buried jewels at more than 50 technology, cleantech, and healthcare organizations, including big names like Boeing, British Telecom, Intel, Lucent, and Philips. Many of the spinouts it has helped to birth have gone on to lucrative exits, including Flarion Technologies (acquired by Qualcomm), Celiant (acquired by Andrew Corporation), SyChip (acquired by Murata), and Vallent (acquired by IBM).

NVP is a spinout itself. It was originally formed in 1997 as the New Ventures Group at Lucent Technologies, the telecom giant that had inherited most of Bell Labs from AT&T. Many technology corporations were experimenting at the time with corporate venture groups as a way to manage disruptive innovation—in fact, Xconomy CEO and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi wrote a feature article about the New Ventures Group and its implications for Lucent and the wider industry for the November 2000 issue of Technology Review. But the group’s tenure inside Lucent turned out to be short-lived. In 2001, with the telecom industry flailing and Lucent in financial disarray, a “special situations” fund called Coller Capital bought most of Lucent’s equity stake in the group’s portfolio, and spun out the core team as New Venture Partners.

NVP went on to raise its own funds and to absorb the corporate venture groups at British Telecom in 2003 and Philips in 2004. In 2007, the firm reeled in one of its biggest catches: David Tennenhouse. A computer scientist who trained at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge, Tennenhouse has a ridiculously broad resume that spans the worlds of academia, defense, corporate research, and e-commerce. Most recently, he’s served as chief scientist and director of the Information Technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; vice president and director of research at Intel Corporation; and vice president of platform strategy at Amazon and CEO of its A9.com research subsidiary.

I got to know Tennenhouse in the early 2000s when he was at Intel. When I returned to the Bay Area this summer to open Xconomy San Francisco and learned that he was at NVP, I contacted him right away to arrange an interview. I wanted to know how the spinout business is going, and how NVP’s challenges differ from those encountered by the average venture capital firm.

Our conversation was in-depth and fascinating, so I’ve broken it up below into two parts. In Part 1 today, Tennenhouse talks about the firm’s basic mission, why large corporations so often fail to find a commercial home for their own promising technologies, and how NVP operates. In Part 2, coming later this week, Tennenhouse talks about specific spinout examples that illustrate his firm’s approach.

Xconomy: What is the mission of New Venture Partners?

David Tennenhouse: The mission is pretty straightforward. To me, it is a bit of a personal mission. It’s identifying “stranded” research and trying to spin that out into stand-alone ventures that can create value for the company that sponsored it, for the employees, and more importantly, at some level, for society as a whole. People always talk about putting research “on the shelf.” There is no shelf. Teams dissipate. Some number of years later, another team comes along and reinvents it.

There are a lot of different reasons why research gets stranded. Applied research is not curiosity-driven, so we usually have a goal of figuring out how to … Next Page »

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Kirby Cramer probably has the most diversified track record of success in life sciences entrepreneurship of anybody in the Northwest. Now he’s putting some of his time and money into strengthening Wings, the budding angel investing network for medical device startups.

“We are blessed in the Northwest to have hundreds of medical device entrepreneurs,” Cramer says. “All they need is some mentorship. A shot in the arm and a shot in the wallet.”

Cramer is now taking on responsibility, along with former Confirma CEO Wayne Wager, as co-chairs of Wings, the Seattle-based angel network we first profiled in February, and which gained further momentum at its kickoff event in April. The two veteran entrepreneurs are stepping into a leadership void after Stefan Kraemer, the co-founder of EndoGastric Solutions and one of the driving forces at Wings, decided to leave the area to take a new job as vice president of medical affairs for C.R. Bard (NYSE: BCR) on the East Coast.

Essentially, Wings is replacing one Kraemer with a Cramer and a Wager. Cramer, 73, has deep roots in the Northwest and a track record that is nationally known. He served as a director of the Northwest’s most successful biotech company (Immunex, sold to Amgen for $10 billion), and the most successful medical device maker (ATL Ultrasound, sold to Philips for $800 million). Earlier in his career, Cramer co-founded and led what became one of the nation’s most successful contract research firms (Hazleton Laboratories, now part of Covance). Cramer is the chairman of Bothell, WA-based SonoSite (NASDAQ: SONO), a position he has held since the company was founded in 1998.

Cramer is also known around the Northwest as a generous donor, having given $1 million in one notable gift to the Seattle School District in 2001, and for his consistent support for the University of Washington Foundation, and the Foster School of Business. “I’m a Husky,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean he’s a bleeding heart who gets involved in just any well-meaning endeavor. He first got exposed to Wings in October 2009 when he was one of the local power brokers invited by the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association to a meeting on boosting medical device entrepreneurship at the Woodmark Hotel in Kirkland. WBBA president Chris Rivera asked him to get involved, but Cramer initially resisted, saying he spends the winter months living at a second home in Palm Desert, CA, and probably wouldn’t have enough time.

Still, he was intrigued by the idea. When he saw over the intervening months that the idea had started to take shape into an organization, business plans started to roll in, and Wings had gotten its inaugural meeting going by April, the timing was right. Cramer liked the progress the organization had made, and he personally saw three business plans through the Wings network that he was interested in learning more about, and possibly investing his personal money into. When he heard … Next Page »

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Wireless digital photo frames, considered one of the hot new categories in consumer electronics back in 2006 and 2007, haven’t taken off as quickly as expected. People love digital frames, but they’ve tended to buy them as gifts pre-loaded with photos they uploaded to the Web, meaning many frames still don’t come with their own connection to the Internet. That’s a problem for Wellesley, MA-based Frame Media, whose whole business, when I last profiled the startup in 2007, revolved around providing fresh digital content for the frames, such as news and sports headlines, weather, and photos shared by friends.

But while Wi-Fi-equipped frames are still playing catchup, another channel for the company’s programming is emerging: so-called “connected screens,” meaning a whole variety of Internet-ready displays that are turning up in homes and offices. As a result, Frame Media is rechristening itself Thinking Screen Media, and going after what CEO Alan Phillips calls “a whole category [of displays] defined primarily by the fact that, unlike PCs, they are limited in their ability to easily search and configure content.” That includes not just digital frames but high-definition TVs, cable set-top boxes, game consoles, Internet radios, and even printers.

Through its FrameChannel platform, Thinking Screen works with publishers such as Time magazine, the New York Times, People magazine, and Weatherbug to offer more than 1,000 channels of content customized for such screens. (Users choose and configure the information feeds at Thinking Screen’s website.) The company is also partnering with virtually every consumer-electronics company on the block—names like Kodak, Motorola, Nintendo, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba—to make it easy for device owners to activate the feeds on specific devices.

“Most of the connected screens haven’t hit the market yet, but they will over the next six months,” says Phillips. In particular, Phillips says, “We’ll see an aggressive push by TV manufacturers to enable TVs to go beyond video.” A taste of what he’s talking about already familiar to millions of video game fans is the home screen of the Nintendo Wii, which, in addition to games, offers links to news, weather, shopping, and photos.

The 15-employee startup collected $5 million in Series A funding from Longworth Venture Partners and CommonAngels in May 2008, and there are plans to raise a Series B round this fall, Phillips says. When it comes to supplying content for tomorrow’s connected screens, Thinking Screen has both technical and strategic advantages over existing and potential competitors, he says.

San Diego-based Chumby, whose interactive media player displays information through “widgets” analogous to Thinking Screen’s channels, is the company’s closest competitor, in Phillips’ judgment. But he thinks Chumby will have a hard time delivering … Next Page »

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A new batch of research grants, worth $19 million, was announced earlier this week by the state Life Sciences Discovery Fund. It’s the quasi-public agency charged with running a 10-year, $350 million program to invest the state’s tobacco settlement money in biomedical research and development. This round, grants were given to develop new vaccines, improve mental health in rural areas, enhance treatment of sudden cardiac arrest, and invent a new way to deliver biotech drugs in cells.

I interviewed John DesRosier, the fund’s director of programs, to try to better interpret what the fund is trying to do. DesRosier (pronounced Duh-ROE-zher) is the point man on staff, with more than 30 years of experience in research and technology commercialization. He’s a University of Washington microbiologist, with experience at a startup, BioControl Systems of Bothell, WA, that introduced four diagnostic tests for detecting dangerous bacteria in food.

Here are the highlights of the interview:

Xconomy: Why did the board pick these four grant proposals?

John DesRosier: My goal has always been to get in front of our board a suite of proposals that are all very, very high quality. The dollar value of that suite is always going to be more than we have available to spend. Then we tell the board they can’t make a mistake. Then we ask them to work on constructing a portfolio of investments they want to make around the state.

X: What about a little on each of these four grants, in terms of why they made the cut?

JD: I guess I’m speaking for the board. There’s always a variety of 11 voices in that room. So what you’ll get from me is a big overview. But with John Roll (of Washington State University), he’s identified a substantial amount of substance addiction and mental health issues are in rural areas, and aren’t being well addressed. I’m reminded that 23 of the 38 counties in the state are rural, and seven of those are subcategorized as “frontier” which means that you have less than one person per square mile. There are mental illness and substance addiction problems out there that are not being well-addressed. The typical protocols for dealing with substance abuse and mental illness have been developed for urban populations.

X: Isn’t it the same treatment, if, say, you have heroin addiction, you take methadone, right? What’s different?

JD: Delivery. It is the same pharmacologically. But a lot of this depends on primary care physicians, who are the only physicians the people in rural areas see. And they’re not trained to do mental health. Part of it is going to be bringing tools and knowledge, and adapting urban protocols to rural.

X: What about the other grants?

JD: You know about Seattle and King County EMS, and how special we are in responding to heart attacks? We’re talking about the group that has made Seattle arguably the top place in the nation for cardiac resuscitation. They are working closely with two external defibrillator makers, one is Medtronic Physio-Control, and the other is Philips. They feel there is still a lot to be done to improve.

X: With a goal of improving the survival rate?

JD: Yes, and to spread it around the state. … Next Page »

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Our apologies to all Xconomy readers for ending the week on a downer, but it’s time for a roundup of the week’s tech layoff news around Boston.

On Wednesday, Cambridge, MA-based Akamai said it would cut 110 jobs, or about 7 percent of its workforce.

On Thursday Luke reported news of 30 more layoffs at Cambridge, MA-based CombinatoRx, leaving the beleaguered biotech with about 55 people, one third the company’s size prior to news earlier this month that its main arthritis drug had failed in clinical trials.

Earlier today we reported that the healthcare unit of Royal Philips NV, headquartered in Andover, MA, will cut about 1,600 people from its staff worldwide, with about 100 of those cuts occurring in Andover.

Xconomy has also received unconfirmed reports about layoffs at two more local companies. WSI, an Andover, MA, company that provides weather information to media, energy, and aviation firms, cut 28 workers or about 10 percent of its staff on November 13, according to one source. And NameMedia, a Waltham, MA company that auctions (and sells advertising on) parked Internet domains, cut 30 workers on November 11, according to another report. We are attempting to obtain confirmation of these job cuts, but at press time no one at either company had responded to our inquiries.

We’ve updated our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker with the latest numbers.

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The healthcare unit of Royal Philips NV, headquartered in Andover MA, will cut 1,600 positions worldwide as part of a restructuring effort that is only partly related to the economic downturn, according to reports today in the Eagle-Tribune, a local newspaper in Andover, and the Boston Globe. About 100 people at the Andover facility will be among those let go. The move comes only a few months after Philips announced it would move the healthcare division’s headquarters to Andover from New York.

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When you see doctors scrambling to save someone in a TV melodrama like “ER” or “Grey’s Anatomy,” there’s a good chance one of their key gadgets came from a real-life crew of engineers in the Seattle area. This region has played a central role in making ultrasound technology one of medicine’s most fundamental tools for looking inside the body to see what’s going right or wrong, without having to lift a scalpel.

The use of sound waves to produce clear images of a developing fetus, or of a heart that’s failing to pump, has its roots in pioneering work at the University of Washington. More specifically, it was the UW Bioengineering department in the 1960s, under the leadership of the late Robert Rushmer, with key contributions by his student Donald Baker. The region now has about 5,000 people working at more than a dozen companies in the ultrasound business, according to UW bioengineering professor Yongmin Kim. Engineers and scientists at these companies are working on a wide range of applications. These include high-resolution images for diagnosing heart trouble, or higher-intensity uses like breaking up fat tissue or cauterizing battlefield wounds.

We have counted 15 companies in the area, most of which reside on the Eastside. It’s not a comprehensive list, so if we have overlooked anyone, please leave us a comment or shoot us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

AcousTx (Seattle, WA)
AcousTx spun off from Therus in 2002, with a different application for ultrasound to stop bleeding. It’s called high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), which it is trying to develop for the U.S. military to stop bleeding with a lightweight portable machine on the battlefield.

Ekos (Bothell, WA)
This company introduced the first commercial system for using ultrasound to break up blood clots in 2005. A newer product helps doctors infuse fluids, like clot-busting thrombolytic drugs, into patients.

Liposonix (Bothell, WA)
Founded in 1999 to use ultrasound as a non-invasive technique for body sculpting, essentially getting ride of unwanted body fat. Its product is sold in Europe, and it was acquired in June by Scottsdale, AZ-based Medicis for $150 million, with potential for another $150 million in milestone payments. CEO Jens Quistgaard, a former chief technologist at Sonosite, says the unit maintains operating autonomy and 45 local employees.

Pacific Bioscience Labs (Bellevue, WA)
This company was founded in 2001 by David Giuliani, who previously started Optiva, the developer of the Sonicare toothbrush. His latest creation is the Clarisonic, a tool that it bills as “the dermatologist’s secret to silky smooth, radiantly fresh skin.”

Philips Healthcare (Bothell, WA)
This is a division of the Netherlands-based electronics giant Philips that was originally founded as ATL Ultrasound. The Philips division makes cart-bound ultrasound machines used for taking images of developing fetuses, diagnosing heart abnormalities, and helping anesthesia doctors perform nerve blocks. … Next Page »

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The giant Dutch company Philips Electronics will move its North American headquarters from New York City to Andover, MA, according to reports in Andover’s Eagle Tribune and the Boston Globe. The move is expected to be announced at a press conference with representatives from Philips and governor Deval Patrick tomorrow.

Philips’ healthcare division has had major operations in Andover since the company acquired Agilent Technology’s healthcare unit eight years ago. The company also has a number of other operations in medical devices and lighting systems in Massachusetts, bringing the total number of Philips workers in the state to almost 4,600.

The company has not been lured to Massachusetts with any tax subsidies or other incentives, Ted Weissenhoff, chief executive of Philips Electronics North America told the Globe. “We didn’t ask for any assistance,” Weissenhoff said. “We are thrilled to death with the innovation we have seen in Massachusetts.”

With sales of roughly $43 billion last year and around 133,000 employees total, Philips is one of the world’s largest electronics firms. The company is the leading producer of lighting equipment, from incandescent lamps to LEDs, and it has a big presence in the medical technology sector. But Philips is best known for its broad range of consumer electronics, from kitchen blenders to electrical shavers and the compact disc.

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FDA Approves Intel Health Guide

Microprocessor-maker Intel is getting into the high-tech health business: its Health Guide has won approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The device records vital signs and allows for videoconferencing with doctors or nurses in remote locations. Daily Tech says Intel is marketing the device to nursing homes and care centers, and also expects that chronically ill people who live in their own homes might purchase the Guide.

Organic Dyes May Lead to Cheaper Solar Panels

In an effort to make solar cells more affordable, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a set of organic dyes that can be coated onto glass to concentrate sunlight for photovoltaic cells underneath. Technology Review says the dyes help collect sunlight and channel it to the cells, much like a fiberoptic cable directs light. The lead researcher, Marc Baldo, says this technique could lead to solar power that is cheaper than coal.

Whales’ Tails May Produce More Wind Power

Studying the mechanics of the fins and tails of whales and dolphins could lead to better-designed wind turbines, Discovery Channel tells us. Researcher Frank Fish of West Chester University in Pennsylvania has been modeling the aerodynamic properties of fins. He finds that adding bumps to a turbine, like those along a humpback whale’s fin, allows it to capture more wind without stalling.

Nanotubes May Make Artificial Photosynthesis Possible

Scientists would love to be able to emulate what plants do so easily – turn sunlight into chemical energy. Now, New Scientist says, researchers have found that carbon nanotubes can mimic an important step in the process, involving the transport of multiple electrons, that scientists haven’t been able to replicate. Artificial photosynthesis could be used to efficiently produce hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles, and even to remove some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

FCC to Test White-Space Devices

High-tech companies would love to use portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that are set aside for television broadcasts (but not being used) for various mobile communication devices. The Federal Communications Commission has yet to issue regulations for this so-called white space. But according to CNN, the FCC says it will begin testing prototype devices from Microsoft, Motorola, and Philips next week.

GOP Seeks to Build its Platform on Facebook

The Republican Platform Committee has launched a website and a Facebook application to solicit public input on its party platform. TechCrunch points out that this may just be a ploy to collect email addresses and solicit donations, but that if the group is sincere, they could start a real public dialogue. No word on whether their Facebook presence will allow you to hug, tickle, or throw a sheep at John McCain.

IBM Wants to Promote “Smart-Grid” Applications

IBM is in the process of creating communications protocols and data formats for so-called “smart grid” devices, inventions designed to make the public electrical grid more flexible and reliable. For instance, a homeowner may have a device connected to an air conditioner that turns up the temperature setting if power demand on the grid becomes too great. CNET News reports that IBM is hoping a common set of standards will make the creation of such devices easier for startup companies.

Mini Cooper Goes Electric

BMW has announced it will start producing an electric Mini Cooper. Motor Trend reports that testing of the vehicle will take place over the next 12 to 18 months. The automaker has not announced what kind of electric engine the Mini Cooper will use.

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Luminus Devices of Billerica, MA, has struck another deal for the distribution of its “PhlatLight” super-bright LED technology, the company announced today. Under the agreement, Toyota Tsusho America, will distribute and support television and projector PhlatLight products in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Mexico. A separate agreement inked last week will facilitate the distribution of PhlatLight technology for general illumination.

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If you’re not crazy about the compact fluorescent lights being touted as the future of home lighting, but you want something more environmentally conscious than Thomas Edison’s old incandescent bulb, Luminus Devices of Billerica, MA, may soon have just the thing for you.

Luminus makes very bright LEDs, and has been doing a nice business for itself selling them to companies like Samsung—which uses them as light sources in large-screen projection TVs over 50 inches—and LG Electronics, which builds them into portable projectors. But last October Luminus announced it wanted to expand into the general illumination business, and hired as its director of sales David Sciabica, a former vice president for sales at Philips Lumileds, that lighting company’s LED division. This week Luminus inked a deal with Avnet Electronics Marketing of Phoenix, AZ, which sells various electronic components in more than 70 countries. Avnet will provide distribution, design, and supply-chain services for Luminus’s Phlatlight technology in the illumination market.

“Phlatlight” comes from the term “photonic lattice,” the technology that makes Luminus’s LEDs so bright. An LED is basically a tiny bit of semiconductor. When you run electricity through it, some percent of the electrons get converted into photons—but a fair number of those photons get reabsorbed and turn into heat before they make it out of the LED. A photonic lattice is a regular series of features inscribed into the LED, with spacing close the wavelength of the light involved. The lattice forces the photons to travel along desired paths, so more of them make it out of the LED, producing more light.

“PhlatLight LEDs produce thousands of lumens from a single large chip and are uniquely suited to replace halogen, arc and fluorescent lamps in many applications such as entertainment, architectural and medical lighting,” said Cary Eskow, director of Avnet LightSpeed, the Avnet division that will handle the LEDs, in a statement announcing the deal.

The photonic lattice technology came out of the lab of MIT professor John Joannopoulos, and was further developed by Alexei Erchak, who earned his Ph.D. there in 2002 and co-founded the company with Joannopoulos that same year. The company has at least 11 US patents and has reportedly raised $67 million in financing.

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Entrepreneurship and innovation are powerful forces that, when combined, can lead to the creation of great value. Last week, the local startup community saw one of its finest recent examples of entrepreneurial innovation, Color Kinetics (CK), deliver nearly $800 million in cash to its shareholders—myself among them—upon the completion of its merger with Royal Philips Electronics. With about $80 million in revenue run-rate and a current year EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) expected in the $4-6 million range, Color Kinetics garnered a valuation that far exceeded typical multiples. Instead, the company’s value reflected the unbounded potential of its innovative LED-based lighting solutions as evidenced by CK’s rapid profitable growth over the past five years under the exemplary leadership of CEO Bill Sims.

Looking back, an early share in a large or growing marketplace, an outstanding team, satisfied and loyal customers, and competitive advantage are often present in such high-value transactions and share between them most of the credit. In the case of Color Kinetics, one additional factor deserves significant credit and that is the intellectual property estate built by the company during its decade of existence. Atypical of many high-technology companies, but quite typical in biotechnology, the strategy of patenting early and often contributed ultimately to the company’s ability to protect and deliver the substantial value it created.

I was approached by one of the founders of Color Kinetics and its first CEO, George Mueller, exactly 10 years ago this week. At that time, he and his co-founder Ihor Lys had the vision of a world filled with color-changing, LED-based, intelligent lights. They had a functioning prototype and the need for capital to begin manufacturing and selling their new lights. Not knowing a lot about the lighting market put me in the company of most, if not all, potential investors in CK. The limited market diligence I could do confirmed that there was a very large lighting market that was stagnant and vulnerable to innovation. Much more exciting than the market-disruption potential, however, was the vast and open IP landscape that existed around the team’s innovations. Based on experiences from the biotechnology industry where the prevailing wisdom is to “patent or perish,” it became apparent that Color Kinetics should establish patents as core to its strategy for value creation.

Building a large patent estate proved to be a very costly undertaking for Color Kinetics. With limited capital, the company had to continuously balance investments in marketing or product development with further investment in new patent filings or enforcement. This balancing act was made even more difficult by the doubt, scrutiny, and even scorn expressed at the value of CK’s patents by prospective investors, the press, and eventually competitors. (This Forbes Magazine article from 2002 provides a nice snapshot of a time when it wasn’t clear what the future would hold for the company.)

Since the first patent was granted in January 2000, Color Kinetics’ patent portfolio has grown to 79 issued U.S. and foreign patents and over 180 pending patent applications. The company implemented a broad-based licensing program that has made the IP available to nearly 50 licensee companies, including industry leaders such as S.C. Johnson, B/E Aerospace, and Ford Motor Company. These licenses are expected to contribute about $5M in licensing revenues this year, most of which drops straight to the bottom line. The company also enforced its IP rights through two patent infringement suits, one of which resulted ultimately in a paid license and damages recovered by CK, and the other was settled as a result of the Philips merger (Philips had previously acquired the party involved in the second suit).

LED-based lighting is well on its way to transforming the lighting industry. The combination of Color Kinetics and Philips represents a formidable alignment of innovation and marketing power. Moreover, both companies have an intense focus on creating intellectual property to protect their investments in R&D and deliver value to their shareholders. While the entrepreneurial phase of Color Kinetics’ life may be ending, the innovations and value creation should persist for a long time.

Noubar was a founding investor and board member in Color Kinetics from inception until last week. He is a co-founder, Managing Partner, and CEO of Flagship Ventures. Since 2000, Noubar has also been a Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where he teaches a course on Entrepreneurship (15:390B) on Monday nights.

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It’s been a crazy week here at Xconomy. We’ve suffered a few technical and other difficulties, but (inside joke alert) we’re keeping our chins up. So, it seems, are many local tech firms.

—Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) amended a $2 billion line of credit and a $5 billion term loan—in part by prepaying $1 billion—in order to gain “additional financial flexibility as it implements initiatives designed to increase shareholder value,” the company announced. The move was not enough, however, to convince Standard and Poor’s to upgrade the firm’s negative rating.

—Cambridge, MA-based Clarus Ventures led a $110 million series E financing round for Globus Medical, a Pennsylvania maker of spinal implants. Dan Primack at peHUB amusingly points out that it’s the largest VC deal of 2007—by $1.65.

—Shareholders approved the acquisition of Boston-based LED lighting firm Color Kinetics (NASDAQ: CLRK) by Philips.

—Waltham, MA’s Adnexus Therapeutics—which develops drugs derived from the protein fibronectin—filed for an IPO worth up to $86 million.

—Veveo in Andover, MA, garnered $14 million in a second round of funding, on top of a first round of the same amount, writes Rafat Ali at MocoNews. Ali calls Veveo’s technology, which won’t launch until September 10, an “impressive service at first glance.”

—Inotek Pharmaceuticals in Beverly, MA closed a $19 million Series C round.

—After hitting a high of $73.95, VMware (NYSE: VMW) closed the week at $71.30, up over 14 points (nearly 25 percent).

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I’m off for the weekend (for the first time in a year or so—did we mention we finally closed our financing?), but there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the local tech scene for those of you who’d still like to think about it over the next couple of days.

—The $791 million acquisition of Boston-based lighting firm Color Kinetics (NASDAQ: CLRK) by Philips moved closer to completion, as the firms gained U.S. and German antitrust approval. Stockholders will vote on the merger agreement on August 22; if it’s approved, the deals should close on the 24th.

—Shares of Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) fell to a 5-year low on Friday, after the company announced that it’s putting its cardiac and vascular surgery businesses on the block, the latest in a series of similar announcements from the firm. The move is aimed at speeding recovery by better focusing the company on its core business.

—As part of a major restructuring effort announced this week, Thousand Oaks, CA-based Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) will close a Rhode Island manufacturing plant and cut jobs at its Kendall Square facility, which employs 200 people. The company has not given a firm target for the number of positions to be eliminated at the facility.

—nTag Interactive, a Boston company whose interactive electronic name badges are designed for ice-breaking and more effective networking at business conferences, landed $8.3 million in Series B funding from Sevin Rosen and Pilot House Ventures, both of which also participated in the company’s A round. Evidently, networking does pay off.

—Rive Technology enhanced its original $5.22 million in Series A funding from Charles River Ventures with an additional $3.15 million from Advanced Technology Ventures. Rive’s improved zeolite catalysts allow petroleum refineries to operate more efficiently; PE Hub has a writeup.

—Following the approval two weeks ago of a once-daily version of Sanctura, its overactive-bladder drug, Lexington, MA-based Indevus Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: IDEV) received a $49.9 million milestone payment from partner firm Esprit Pharma.

—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) struck a deal worth up to $30 million with Seattle-based Cell Therapeutics (NASDAQ and MTAX: CTIC); the agreement gives the Seattle firm U.S. marketing, sales, and development rights to the lymphoma treatment Zevalin.

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